Global Voltage Scaling Across Multiple Cores for Real-Time Workloads

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been the subject of extensive study for the past two decades. DVFS has been shown to dramatically reduce power consumption and thermal stress and is now routinely used in both embedded and general-purpose systems. However, DVFS research has largely focused on independently controlling voltage and frequency for individual cores. Less well studied is the case of global DVFS (GDVS), where multiple cores share the same voltage and clock. A very simple GDVS heuristic is presented in this letter; it is lightweight and effectively exploits task profiling information to appropriately sequence task executions. Simulation studies show its effectiveness.